Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  We were great ones, too, for winter concerts. Home-brew, a good violin, a few recitations and the use of the parish hall gave a little innocent (or wicked) entertainment, while the wind howled and the snow drifted high. And famously—at least, famously to us—there was “janneying” of “the mummers,” the cross-dressing pastime of the twelve days of Christmas.

  Neighbours, in ridiculous or elaborate disguise, visited neighbours. The jannies or mummers were invited in; a guessing game over the identities of the visitors was the next part, and when all were spotted or revealed, a little singing, a little dancing and much rum concluded the visit. It was sweet sport.

  Much of this, though not all, faded with the synthetic and vicarious amusements of TV. Sitcoms have quieted more invention than we will ever tabulate. With each “advance” of our remorselessly entertained society—from CDs to GameBoys, Cineplexes to iPods—the urge or the need to amuse ourselves has been tranquillized.

  The great national response to winter, and the greatest shield against its many glooms and ravages, was, of course, the invention of hockey. Hockey may be seen, in its earliest manifestation, as a means of turning winter against itself; of giving a very great number of people, who were definitely not masochists, a reason to look forward to the time when all the lakes and ponds were frozen and the wind chill bit the soul. Hooray, we’re freezing! Let’s play hockey!

  I never had the skill, the grace or—truth to tell—the heart for the game, but everyone I have ever known, with the exception of a few as impoverished as I am of all athletic resource, played or were fans or both. From one end of the country to another, from north to south, hockey, played and watched, has insinuated itself into the very codes of the Canadian experience.

  The advent of professional hockey was the (pun half-intended) crystallizing culmination of our adoption of the sport. In professional hockey, all those amateurs and fans who knew and loved the game just from their own ordinary experience of it got to see it as it was meant to be.

  He who plays “Chopsticks” is not Vladimir Horowitz. But even a little acquaintance with a piano is the perfect passport to really appreciating the miracles with which Horowitz, wizard of the keyboard that he was, sprinkled his every performance. It’s a rare delight, watching something you only partially understand and imperfectly execute, taken to its highest expression by a master.

  Every boy or girl who has ever laced a skate and chased a puck knows something of that delight. Since there’s been a Hockey Night in Canada, our legendary virtuosi have been there for all to see and worship, from Richard to Lemieux.

  Except, of course, now. We are heading into a Canadian winter minus the thrilling anodyne of professional hockey.

  This cannot be a good thing. We are a fragile country. We cannot depend on Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire alone to keep us together. Or infinite reruns of The Simpsons and Law & Order, the new default Canadiana.

  It’s going to be a long winter. We may, dear Lord, have nothing but the spare kindling of politics and Ron MacLean subbing as a movie critic to keep us warm. How far away—O June, how far away.

  ONE NATION | November 27, 2006

  That the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada is, they’ve been telling us, just words, just symbolism, and, now, merely a “motion.”

  Well, words are what we live by. They are the foundational marble of our intellectual, moral and civic existence. Some of them—“home,” “country,” “nation”—constitute the deepest meaning in our lives. As for symbols, well, the flag is a symbol. Symbols are extremely powerful. They are concentrated meaning, the emblems of our deepest common passions.

  And as for it being merely a motion, the parliament of the nation of Canada is the ultimate deliberative and legislative body of the nation of Canada. A motion passed with all-party approval in that parliament specifying one group of citizens, the Québécois, as a nation—well, that’s the highest imprimatur any words about Canada can have. So trying to brush off as “mere” words the idea of the House of Commons recognizing the Québécois as a nation within Canada is absurd.

  The Commons hasn’t done anything as significant in years. This is of the utmost importance. It is changing the grounds on which we, all of us, understand our idea of Canadian citizenship, and the idea of the one nation to which we, all of us, give our fealty.

  How important? Today a minister, Michael Chong, resigned. By the way, good for him. It’s refreshing to see so dignified a stand on a matter of principle and a politician willing to lose cabinet rank because he thinks something is fundamentally wrong. Mr. Chong deserves respectful credit. The motion itself is a train of mischief and ambiguity, as is the entire concept of nominating subsets of Canadians based on their ethnicity or historical associations or geographical boundaries or constitutional past—Newfoundland would be an example—as nations in their own right. But it is particularly mischievous and ambiguous when it sets the Québécois as the community designated for nation status.

  What is the Parliament of Canada doing declaring the Québécois a nation? Has that not been the principal aim of the Parti Québécois and the Bloc, the separatists, since their formation? The idea behind this motion has been a mischief since the train was put on the track by Michael Ignatieff in his leadership bid, and as it gained momentum with the Bloc’s embrace and Stephen Harper’s too-clever response last week, it has become more divisive by the day, igniting the call now by the premier of British Columbia to go one more step and incorporate all aboriginal peoples in another group nation.

  There’s no reason to stop there. It sets a division within Quebec—who are the Québécois? All Quebecers? Some? French-speaking people across the country—are they part of this new nation too? And this will spark division outside Quebec. Why not a Ukrainian nation? A nation of Labrador? An Alberta nation?

  The House of Commons, the House of Commons of Canada, should be underlining only one nation: Canada. We are all its citizens, regardless of height, colour, province, language, history, religion or politics. Canada is the nation, and the biggest quarrel I have with this motion tonight is that our parliamentarians seem to have the courage to declare a bit, a slice, a portion of the country a nation when they are timid about asserting and constantly asserting and proudly asserting that Canada is the nation, and all Canadians are already and deeply a part of it. But I forgot, it’s only words.

  I’m WITH THE BRAND | May 17, 2008

  On this Victoria Day weekend, back home in Newfoundland, there will be thousands of people hustling off to cabin or pond to make a day of trout fishing and having a boil-up. Very likely it’ll snow, since a snowfall is an almost infallible curse of the first long weekend of Newfoundland spring. In the old days, if there was to be a boil-up and a few trout to be fried, everyone brought along a block of Good Luck butter and three or four tins of York wieners and beans. Had to be York, had to be Good Luck.

  Good Luck and York were the brands of choice. Newfoundlanders, for reasons that defy any substantial analysis, bonded with certain brands. Robin Hood flour, a local bread called (excruciatingly) Mammy’s, a chocolate bar that was not a bar at all (Cherry Blossom), Klik canned beef—there were a batch of such brand items that simply belonged. I’ve seen Libby’s beans on camping trips, but I knew, and everyone else did, too, that the dolt who brought them was a stranger and an heretic.

  Certain items moved into a territory of being more than just commodities. They offered a kind of whimsical identity, a grocery shelf of Newfoundlandia. In the really old days, a plug of Target chewing tobacco was as much a part of a fisherman’s kit as nets and lines.

  All were more emblems than products.

  The same phenomenon can be seen on a much wider plane today with Tim Hortons. I doubt anyone can locate the moment Hortons stopped being a small doughnut shop serving, at best, indifferent coffee and transmuted into a hallowed piece of Canadiana, but that it arrived no one can doubt. Outside of Hockey Night in Canada and—with reverence—Don Cherry, there a
re few institutions or companies that have blended into the character of the nation so completely as Tim Hortons.

  I became a hostage to Boston cream doughnuts so long ago the day is lost in gooey memory. And now, in every town and city across the country, despite the advances of the upscale chains, the aggressive yuppie haunts of Starbucks Corp., the gentrified caffeine oases of Timothy’s and Second Cup, Tim Hortons remains the venue of choice for all everyday Canadians. You knew the Canadian effort in Afghanistan had registered with the great Canadian public when Tim Hortons opened in Kandahar. Hortons is not the red Maple Leaf, but it has brewed and baked its way into being an essential piece of Canadiana.

  Up to now, anyway. I think Tim Hortons is drifting from its special status. This has nothing to do with the fury of recent weeks over the woman fired for giving away a Timbit to a crying infant—though that incident may be a signal of how the brand has strayed. Nor has it to do, in my judgment, with the consideration that Tim Hortons was, until recently, purely a Canadian company (Wendy’s owns it now).

  No, the change is more subtle and has crept in by a kind of osmosis.

  Perhaps the invisible moment was the first time a Canadian went to a Tim’s not for itself, but more because it wasn’t a Starbucks. A reverse-preference moment. Perhaps it came when Tim Hortons became conscious that it really wasn’t just selling cheap coffee and doughnuts. (That, incidentally, was more than a while ago. Just one old-fashioned plain is eighty cents now; years back, you could buy the whole front counter display case of doughnuts for about five bucks.) Perhaps it was the moment when they became self-conscious, and started to see themselves as a symbol.

  Something has leaked out of the enterprise. Did the coffee change? Are the doughnuts still as fresh as once they so proudly boasted they were? I’m not sure what it was or is, but, for me anyway, the zest has gone out of the transaction between chain and customer. Their “roll up the rim” is a farcical gimmick. The signature phrases—“double double” being the most familiar—gall more than they please. Their ridiculous lineups—in some places it takes longer to get a coffee than to pick up a licence at a motor vehicle registration office—have lost the kind of self-congratulatory charm they had some time back. People used to smile at each other for the silly indulgence of lining up for a not-very-good cup of coffee. They don’t smile as much anymore. They mutter.

  Most of all, people don’t feel the loyalty they once did. It is no longer a traitorous act to wander into Second Cup—though, it must be noted, treading into Starbucks is still a barista too far. All in all, I think Timmy’s—another unfortunate coinage—is past its best-before date. The romance has wilted. The coffee has cooled. It has had its crowning moment as a badge of this great white north, but unless something in the chemistry between coffee and customer changes, real soon, the days of Tim Hortons as an essential Canadian experience are dwindling and few.

  HANDS OFF HORTONS | January 9, 2009

  Unlike the Americans, we don’t have a written pledge that guarantees our right to the Pursuit of Happiness. But over time, we’ve evolved. I think it’s now generally agreed that, while the founders of the Canadian state were a little slack in spelling things out, that ordinary Canadian has determined that a morning visit to Tim Hortons, and the prospect of the first fresh Boston cream doughnut makes up for any defects in our Constitution—and places the pursuit of happiness right where it should be: in the salivating reach of all.

  We hold this truth to be self-evident: that the Boston cream doughnut is the acme of human civilization as we know it, and that the only experience better than an early coffee and a Boston cream is an early coffee and two Boston creams. Isn’t mathematics wonderful?

  The Boston cream doughnut—paradise with a chocolate coating. Now, I have seen people at Tim Hortons who’ve actually ordered a danish. But then, that’s what they were—Danish, I mean. Once, I even saw a guy ask for the tea biscuit. But he doesn’t count. I think he was a nutritionist.

  However, there’s alarming news on the Timmy’s front. Back home in St. John’s, I hear some cabal is trying to ban the drive-thrus. Trying to slow access to Tim Hortons in … Newfoundland? Shut down the Seal Hunt, why dontcha? Ban Flipper pie? Make accordion-playing a public offence? What is going on in my home and native land? Have they all become Diana Krall fans?

  Mark my words, this is the Chapters crowd, with their Starbucks “emporia,” and their Chicken Soup for the Soul “literature”—and those inedible splodges Chapters/Starbucks offer in place of the honest doughnut. Have you ever tried to eat something at a Starbucks?

  That crowd are either all come-from-aways, or they should be. Furthermore, what’s this prissy attitude about Tim Horton drive-thrus? Too downmarket for you? Too pickup truck? Too—horrors!—Don Cherry? Michael Ignatieff, I hope you’re paying attention here.

  But there’s a bigger issue, too. We’re about to throw a hundred billion or so out the window in the next federal budget—now there’s your drive-thru—for businesses that don’t work. And here’s the one business in Canada, up to its knees in cash—the most loyal clientele on the face of this hungry earth—and some damn town councils want to see if they can knock it down. Have you seen the boat that the guy who used to own Tim Hortons just launched? He’s not going to be looking for a bailout—unless it’s from the marble hot tub.

  Canada is a vast geographical expanse variegated only by Tim Hortons outlets—our coffee-shop parliaments, which offer coffee in cup sizes people can actually understand, where using white sugar is not a crime, and where the person serving you—thank God—would die if you called her a barista. Canada is one huge drive-thru for Tim Hortons.

  It’s bad enough we’re in a recession/depression. It’s bad enough Stephen Harper has been scared into opening the federal spigot on January 27 in a way we haven’t seen in a generation. But, for godsake, there’s only one thing still working in this country. Tim Hortons. Leave it alone. If you want to read Wally Lamb or The Life of Pi next to the Oprah’s Picks stand, you know where to go. But leave Tim Hortons out of it.

  SCANDAL

  COMPLETELY FOXED | March 15, 2008

  William Blake saw visions. But not even Blake, pottering about naked in his back garden chatting with angels, as he was wont to do, could have fantasticated something as alien to the age he lived in as the Emperors Club, with its diamond-rated filles d’hôtel, available at rates of one to five thousand dollars an hour, ordered up as easily as pizza.

  Which is not to say that Blake was ignorant of purchased pleasure. Prostitution, as the glib axiom testifies, is the oldest profession, and from drab to courtesan, camp-follower to fille de joie, the variety of its practitioners is one of its enduring characteristics. Rather, the poet was more progressive than the age in which he wrote, sensed more keenly the misery that brought women to traffic in their flesh, and the miseries that traffic imposed.

  Indeed, poor, old, crazy, wise Blake, in his poem “London,” penned a verse of much pity and anger on the subject:

  But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

  How the youthful Harlots’ curse

  Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,

  And blights with plagues the

  Marriage hearse.

  Between prosecuting and patronizing upscale cat-houses (a neat trick, in both senses), Eliot Spitzer probably didn’t have much time for poetry, but he may want to check Blake now.

  There was something in the face of Mrs. Spitzer, called to stand twice with her self-disgraced hypocrite husband at news conferences, that said she understood the force of Blake’s phrase “marriage hearse.” And Mr. Spitzer himself might have a less self-centred idea of the damage he’s done from another of Blake’s warning couplets. Contra the theme of enlightened argument, prostitution is not a victimless crime, but a social toxin:

  The harlot’s cry from street to street

  Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.

  A governor who rents women is complicit in the state’s


  decay.

  Blake’s wisdom is perhaps too crisp and emphatic for our relaxed age, where pimps—at least in certain venues—have more currency than pastors. Pointing to the moral and social dimension of Governor Spitzer’s bedroom transactions, via Blake or anyone else, is probably gauche, or even worse, judgmental.

  After all, following this “personal tragedy,” as, unfailingly, it is called, Mr. Spitzer must have time to “heal.” The warm, moist towelettes of pop therapy must be laid on his troubled brow, distillations of Deepak/Oprah chatter sluiced on his injured esteem. Let us pray there’s a spa where he can “confront his demons” guided by selected readings from the Book of Charlie Sheen. After which, he can, of course, “move on,” “put it behind him” or, if he is truly heroic, “reach out to others,” “repair his relationships” and appear on a call girl-themed edition of The View, gushing apologies and bleeding “authentic” recovery from every self-exhibiting pore.

  There aren’t really many original observations to come out of the Spitzer train wreck. That the powerful are arrogant is the weariest of commonplaces. That a crusading prosecutor would commit the very crimes he prosecutes would not startle a six-year old. Lear railed against that precise hypocrisy four centuries ago:

  Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

  Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;

  Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind for

  which thou whipp’st her.

  I have some admiration for those who named the call-girl enterprise The Emperors Club. What could be more appealing to the egotism of the clientele, the brassy overachievers of politics and commerce? Real emperors, alas, do not lurk in hotel rooms under aliases or pseudonyms. Napoleon would never check in as “George Fox,” which was Mr. Spitzer’s nom de whore. The name, incidentally (besides being that of the seventeenth-century founder of the Quakers), is that of one of Mr. Spitzer’s closest friends, which must have pleased the real George Fox when it raced around the world in every newspaper and on every TV station. Mr. Spitzer was digging a pit for maximum accommodation. Was ever a man so intent on making sure that, should he be caught, everyone—friend, foe, neutral or intimate—would have a reason to despise him?